During WWII, the Third Reich invaded and occupied Denmark; and for the first few years (c. 1940 into 43) this was a classic example of what people nowadays call "soft" totalitarianism - meaning, totalitarianism imposed without use of violent coercion.
Denmark had a population of about three million - so how many Germans do you think were needed to control this population?
The answer from military historian Rowland White's recent book (Mosquito: the extraordinary true story of the legendary RAF aircraft...) is... eighty-nine. That is 89.
Averaging one German to administer more than 30,000 Danes.
I found this very interesting; given that the Third Reich has (for obvious reasons) become a bye-word for the most purposively-aggressive and physical form of totalitarianism.
Of course, the handful of Germans were backed by the threat of German military might and the rest of it; yet the numbers tell us that the imposition of totalitarian rule - even during a world war! - can be and was accomplished by "soft" methods...
Presumably some mixture of factors such as effective ideological propaganda, tacit support of the regime, and the calculations of fear and expediency in a situation where "there is no alternative" and "resistance is futile".
The value of this insight is that most people doubt that we of The West inhabit a totalitarian system of governance, because we do not see the apparatus of violent physical coercion that we have been taught is a necessary feature of such politics.
Yet, the example of Denmark proves that rigorous and efficient "soft" totalitarian rule is possible, and effective (at least, for a few years) by a tiny number of alien controllers; combined with the cooperation (or "collaboration") of sufficient natives of the national leadership class, and the tacit consent of the bulk of the remainder.
It also seems to prove that totalitarianism works best when it is "soft" - when it deploys soft-ideas rather than hard-violence.
How many "outsiders" does it take to rule a UK of 60 million?
Does it just scale up proportionately to... a couple of thousand aliens? Or are the economies of scale and fewer than 2K aliens are needed. Or do the difficulties multiply exponentially and maybe... tens of thousands are needed?
Either way, it is salutary to realize that a thoroughly totalitarian system need not deploy large numbers of external-rulers, nor physical coercion, to be a very complete and effective mechanism of mass control.
And, of course, this is exactly what we find, here and now - could we but recognize it.
Note: Rowland White's books tells a story of how this peaceful state of soft totalitarianism was deliberately subverted by British military intelligence by developing a sabotage network, that eventually grew to provoke violent German reprisals, and "hard" totalitarianism - which led to much greater Danish resistance; and the intended transfer of many more German personnel and resources to control Denmark. This effective intervention by another alien power - i.e. the UK - is also a demonstration of how a very few people who want to destabilize a system by guerrilla methods, can do so. The whole narrative seems to me one of elite external powers manipulating the Danish masses for their own ends.
5 comments:
I assume every society, of any size, is dominated by a single clique, and that such a ruling clique will always have 150 members, that is, Dunbar's number. Apparently, 89 is the number of clique members required to dominate the other 61. I suggest we call 89 'Stauning's number', after the wartime Prime Minister of Denmark.
@Crosbie - Yes but "Dunbar's number" was pulled out of thin air, in effect!
I was an evolutionary psychologist from 1994, and used to know Dunbar slightly (and much appreciated most of his work); and when he floated this idea I was very critical of his evidential and theoretical basis. I have found it dismaying to observe the confirmation-bias induced endorsement over the past thirty years.
The thing is - there just are not such numbers. The context of inter-personal interaction is the causal factor - how frequent the interactions, are the people genetically related, are they mutually selected, what is their evolutionary and cultural history? etc.
@Crosbie - So eager was I to rant against Dunbar's number (!), that I forgot to provide a relevant comparison. To administer Norway, with a smaller population than Denmark, the Third Reich required 3,000 Germans - which is considerably more than thirty-fold extra, per unit of population.
The point made was that Germany wanted to be efficient in their exploitation - to get the most resources from their colony (especially in food) for the least input of manpower and effort. Soft totalitarianism - if you can get away with it - is far more efficient than the hard type; but the basic system (i.e. totalitarianism) is the same.
The way in which here-and-now Western soft totalitarianism is auto-subverting (for instance by investing in vast and accelerating mass immigration with increasing "antiracist" preferences) *will* lead to the need for hard totalitarianism, or else social collapse - which indicates that the Western totalitarian system has broken down, internally - and is now strategically seeking to destroy itself.
Bruce, you might like Byung Chul Han's Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. He writes about how soft power is more effective than hard power. When there isn't any *one* to rebel against there isn't any rebellion. Which is very much what we see in the west, there is no rebellion, but the soft power is immense and all-consuming for most everyone.
@R - One of the ain factors in enabling more effective "soft" power is probably the vast expansion of mass media, plus I think the leadership class learned lessons from the dictatorships of the mid-war era.
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